20 Jobs That Have Become Dominated by Women

The landscape of the U.S. job market has changed considerably in recent years. One of the most notable trends is the increasing participation of women in the workforce. In 2000, women held approximately 40.5% of all jobs in the United States. As of 2016, 43.1% of all U.S. workers were female.

The overall uptick in the labor force participation of women obscures the massive changes that have occurred in some professions. In some occupations, the shares of female workers climbed by over 20 percentage points since the turn of the millennium.

Many of the jobs in which female participation is increasing most rapidly are high paying. In half of the jobs on this list, median earnings for women are higher than the median wage for all workers of $45,860. Still, women do not earn more than their male counterparts in any of the jobs on this list.

Men and women each tend to sort into different jobs, which largely explains the gender pay gap in the United States. The rising shares of women in certain high paying jobs therefore helps explain gains made closing the gender pay gap. In 2000, women earned just 73 cents for every dollar men earned. As of 2016, the gender pay gap narrowed to 80 cents on the dollar. With a handful of exceptions, the gender pay gap shrank in the majority of jobs on this list.

24/7 Wall St. compared U.S. Census data from 2000 and 2016 on employment composition by gender in over 300 occupations to identify the 20 jobs that have become dominated by women. More than half of all workers are women in every job on this list, and the increase in the share of women working in these professions range from 6.4 to 25.1 percentage points.